On Sat, 2018-09-15 at 14:04 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> It would be nice if we had an official ftpmasters' position. So far, all
> we have are remarks on IRC.
>
> The case here is the package "parallel" having recentlish grown a demand for
> either a citation or 10000€. This is explicitely forbidden by the GPL FAQ:
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#RequireCitation
> and interpreting the request as a demand rather than mere suggestion is
> reinforced by the alternative being a (high) monetary fee rather than
> nothing.
>
> The issue has been raised by multiple people on multiple bug trackers.
Vague references ("multiple bug trackers") aren't really helpful. I'm
not going to search for "multiple bug trackers" somewhere on the
internet.
> Unless my analysis is wrong, I see the following options: either
>
> * the demand is considered a part of the license, in which case the package
> needs to be moved to non-free or removed from the archive completely
> (depending whether the demand is considered overriding a part of the GPL3
> or being a conflicting addition)
It isn't in d/copyright and one of the copyright holders seems to have
said that this isn't a legal requirement (in
https://bugs.debian.org/905674#27). The other copyright holder is the
FSF which also don't think this should be a requirement as you cited
above.
> * the demand is a part of the code only. It then can be removed (as it
> causes practical problems like #884793), against express wishes of the
> upstream -- although in this case, per the legal demands made by upstream
> in newer versions, we'd need to rename the package[1][2].
Which legal demands?
Ansgar
(Shouldn't GNU parallel at least cite Perl itself? :-) )
